That means Fruita, Palisade, Clifton and the rest of unincorporated Mesa County are open for RD loans, which can cover 100 percent of the appraised value of homes, said Dennis Edson, chairman of Unifirst Mortgage in Grand Junction.

In some cases, closing costs could even be folded into the loan, said Erika Doyle, chairwoman-elect of the Grand Junction Area Realtors Association.

“The only place in western Colorado where it’s not available is in the core of Grand Junction,” basically between 19 and 31 roads, Edson said.

Elements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also could buoy the Grand Valley housing market. An $8,000 tax credit available to first-time home buyers during most of 2009 could come in handy for buyers, Edson said.

“We’re going to promote the program pretty extensively,” Edson said. “It just needs to be talked about” and is available to many of the home buyers in the Grand Valley area.

The credit replaces a $7,500 incentive that got little attention, perhaps because the tax break had to be repaid over a period of years, Edson said.

While the energy industry might have driven much of the market, with people moving into the area to work in the natural gas business over recent years, that picture is a bit deceiving.

“The biggest part of the market is ourselves,” people already living in western Colorado, looking for bigger homes to accommodate growing families or others looking to downsize, Reece said.

One thing that seems not to have occurred is an influx of buyers from California hoping to escape the Golden State’s well-documented financial woes, Doyle said.

“We’d love for them to come to Colorado,” Doyle said, “the West Slope in particular.”

California buyers who sold homes in the early 1980s and invested their cash in new Colorado homes played a significant role in the Grand Valley’s economic recovery.

“But that’s just not happening here today,” Edson said.

High-end housing is taking a hit in the Grand Valley market, “but houses under $300,000 are holding up pretty well,” Edson said.

To be sure, said Reece, January sales figures were less than impressive, meaning they looked no better than those of December.

Edson, however, said he detected a slight shift in his company records when he noticed that applications for mortgages were rising slightly.

In recent months, Unifirst was busy mostly with refinancing business from homeowners looking to take advantage of lower rates to save money on their monthly mortgage payments.

Nationally, he said, there have been hundreds of thousands of refinances, and that could add up to a significant economic stimulus that goes largely unmeasured.

While the Grand Valley might now be a buyer’s market, “It’ll be a short-term buyer’s market,” said Eric Perry of Epic Homes.

Whereas he has had as many as five homes under construction at once in the recent past, he said he’s down to one or two these days.

“I’m kind of optimistic that the national economy has turned,” Perry said. “People kind of overreacted. That’s typical of economic cycles and swings.”